The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

Homeland from the plan-drawing ass-holes? Conbat would redress all faults and deal with any situation…

The wind, like a mongrel cut loose off its chain, tumbles in helter-skelter around, snaps at the loosened ear-flaps of our hats, whips their strings against the faces. Yet, the wind’s main job is to drag along in its current the black and gray clouds tumbling and scudding as low as the cabin top of the tower crane. Because of those clouds, all around from morning to night drowns in gloomy twilight. To get warm there's the trailer heated with our breathing.

The mitts had long since got worn to tatters, we grab the frosty rebar-rods with the rags found in the trailer. A strike of the rebar breaker against the frozen ground cleaves off a sliver of it hardly bigger than a walnut; then another splinter, and one more.

With his back to the wind, your partner waits for you to break away a shovelful of chips for him to scrape them off and throw away. Then you change each other… As Vitya Strelyany cared to put it:

"We were brought to StavropolTo dig and shovel the ground,But it is so fucking hard,Harder can't be found."

(…however, I entertain an unshared suspicion that it was an adaptation of a Zona couplet from the period of first five-year plans in the Soviet history, turned out in the mines of Donbas…)

But there's always a nook to feel happy in – oh, how sweet is dozing off when seated on the floor of the trailer with your back leaned against the backs of your comrades!

After half-day of breaking-scraping, we discovered that at the depth of half-meter-plus the permafrost transformed into the ground of almost equal hardness, yet yielding to the strikes with a bayonet spade. Three days later we developed the trench digging technique. First, you dig a hole meter-by-meter and two meters deep, then with an interval of one meter, you dig another such hole and connect these two by a burrow thru the softer ground at their bottoms under the bridging crust of frozen layer. The bridge is cinched about by the crane slings and you will hollow out two grooves across the edges of the permafrost bridge until the crane power is enough to tear off and hoist the whole block of frozen ground. Ha! Fuck you, bitch!.

Yes, the construction battalion did it!. And although there remained many days of breaking and scraping to the very end of the trench, we won the day. We broke the backbone of the polar night twilight that had descended as far as the city of Stavropol…

Besides the trailer, you also could shelter from the frost in the staircase-entrances of the multi-apartment block on the other bank of the pit. Out of the piercing wind, a cigarette chiseled from a passer-by in a staircase could also warm you up…

While I was basking in the staircase-entrances, Alimosha and Novikov explored the surrounding territories and discovered a dairy factory there, as well a bakery plant. Just a question of climbing a pair of fencing walls. They returned swollen like balloons with cardboard half-liter pyramids of milk, and loaves of hot bread tucked under their padded jackets. Since that day we were sending foragers there. The workers of both enterprises allowed you to lift your loot directly from the production lines…

At times, we went out on the street to beg money from the passers-by. "Bro, 27 kopecks short of a bottle, can you help out?"… "Sister, 11 kopecks for a pack of "Belomor", eh? Two days without a smoke.."

Alimosha explained the nuances to me. Never address the pensioner oldies – no go, and they might even start to yell. Asking for a round sum was also a mistake; instead of 27 he would give you at least 30, and instead of 11 you'd get 15 kopecks.

What the money for? Well, instead of 9-kopeck shag, or bitter "Pamir" for 11 kopecks, you could buy Cuban "Portugas", aka "the thermonuclear", or that same "Prima" again; but not Indian "Red and White" – a sour crap in golden-foil wrappers. And sometimes we drink wine too; to drive away fatigue and flush down the snack from the bakery plant.

Oh, how low I fell! Cadging on the street! Where's my decency, my self-esteem? How could I possibly not die of shame?

(…well, firstly, in our cant there was a more precise term for that activity: we were not cadging, but jackalling.

As for my decency and self-esteem whereabouts, they're always by me only their shape vacillate unlike some rigidly constant values as that of never-ending Pi we were taught at school for I don’t know what purpose.

And in regard to shame, I'm probably a pervert here. I feel more ashamed of robbing that Whatman paper tophat from credulous Valya Pisanko, than of receiving soiled coppers in my capped palm from the passers-by.

And even though I might, at certain points, be a noble man, yet, on the whole, I'm anything but a Spanish grandee, and you can safely take my word for it…)

In February, the bread-and-butter carnival was over; we were transferred to the construction of the Medical Center whose basement was already bridged over with concrete flooring slabs, but not completely. Underneath those slabs, we were hiding from the winter wind around a fire built of any lumber or raw-timber we came across and split with the breakers because there was no trailer to shelter in.

The territory of the future Medical Center were vast indeed, but being on the city outskirts it provided no hunting grounds for jackalling…

The trucks for our transportation to work and back all were from a local motor depot manned by the civvy drivers… Ours was a hairy asshole. He flew into the grounds of the would-be Medical Center on his UAZ-66, hit the brakes and the truck glided over the icy ground, turned around and stopped still – get in, off we go!

During the trick, the badly fixed, tattered, canvas top quacked and bubbled like a parachute in arms